Within the pale gypsum dunes of New Mexico’s White Sands National Parks is an ancient trackway of footprints that dates the human story in North America back 21-23,000 years ago. Their tracks interlaced with those of a giant ground sloth, it would be easy to imagine these people as strangers in a strange land. Yet even then, humans were in the company of a bird who continues to be quintessential to our experience of the southwest. When Homo sapiens arrived in North America, they were likely greeted by the croaking calls of the Common Raven. For millennia, ravens have closely followed our settlements, drawn to the spoils left behind by successful hunts. All this time under the watchful eyes of these jet-black birds has generated a richly-storied relationship, one that calls us to lead a more mindful, ecological existence. When New Mexicans feel an affinity with ravens today, it is a sense with a deep history. Common Ravens enchant New Mexico residents with their intelligence, and a curiosity that often feels directed at us. This intuition about raven intellect is supported by behavioral studies demonstrating that the birds’ performance in cognitive tests parallels that of great apes like chimpanzees. Such clever minds enabled ravens to carve out a niche alongside another brainy, social carnivore. Ravens and humans have been fellow travelers through the ages. Archaeological excavations of 30,000-year-old hunter-gatherer settlements in the Czech Republic revealed a significant abundance of Common Ravens, likely attracted by the consistent opportunity to scavenge butchered mammoth carcasses. The authors of a 2023 Nature paper suggest that these ice age ravens may illustrate one of the earliest examples of synanthropy: wild animals prospering in a human-shaped environment. More recently, people may have found mutual benefit in such interactions. As relayed in the works of anthropologist Richard Nelson, the Koyukon Athabascan people in Alaska describe pacts of cooperative hunting with ravens. According to the hunters, ravens will guide them to a moose or bear, and receive a fresh carcass to scavenge in return. Environmental educator Joel Pontius recounts a similar experience with ravens while hunting elk in Place-based Learning for the Plate, reflecting that, “the landscape still addresses humans as animals, whether we hear this or not.” In Wild New World, New Mexico-based historian Dan Flores discusses how ravens feature as arbiters of proper hunting behavior in the oral traditions of Inuit and Koyukon peoples. Flores suggests that such cautionary tales may have carried hard-earned lessons in sustainability from times when prior cultures blundered, such as during the ice age extinctions. What lessons do ravens offer today, as a Sixth Extinction event looms? As synanthropes, ravens remind us that our built environments need not be dead-zones for wildlife, and in fact can support them through backyard habitat gardens or wildlife crossing structures. Interdependencies with other species lay dormant all around us, waiting to be revived if only we attend to what the ecological communities we reside in ask of us.
Jay Cooney is a Naturalist at Wild Birds Unlimited of Santa Fe
